Center makes every day Earth Day

	Illustration by Claudia McGehee.

"People will look back and shake their heads and think of the fossil fuel age as the time when humanity managed to burn up, in one to two hundred years, resources that took 200 million years to create, and gassed themselves in the process," Schnoor says.

Then why is Schnoor smiling?

Well, for one reason, as co-director, along with Gregory Carmichael, of the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research (CGRER), Schnoor knows that while current environmental reality may be grim, awareness of and sensitivity to environmental issues is growing. And he knows that a small part can be attributed to work done by the center, a 64-member interdisciplinary and inter-institutional group established at The University of Iowa with the intention of looking at global and regional environmental change.

"The research of center members involves assessing the environment and proposing solutions," says Schnoor, professor of civil and environmental engineering. Much of the research data generated by the center is used to create computer simulations based on mathematical models, which can be used to predict future environmental responses.

On the side of assessing damage comes the research of Carmichael, professor of chemical and biochemical engineering, who is currently in Japan conducting a study on the impact and movement of atmospheric pollutants. His work helped inform policy making during the 1997 Kyoto Accord, in which many nations pledged to decrease their fossil fuel emissions by seven percent. (The Kyoto Accord has not yet been ratified.)

Students and a staff member of the Center for Global and Environmental Research Center use the Immersadesk, a computer modeling tool, to examine a map of Asian air pollution transport. Looking at the map are Phillip Keith, an undergraduate in chemical engineering, Jeremie Moen, the center’s departmental information specialist, and Sarath Guttikunda, a Ph.D. student in chemical and biochemical engineering specializing in atmospheric chemistry and environmental policy. Photo by Rex Bavousett.

Schnoor’s research on burning switch grass as an alternative to coal is one example of the center’s research on solutions to limiting fossil fuel emissions. As it grows, switch grass takes its carbon from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and thus is benign when it is burned: It does not add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

"Coal is cheap, and railways are subsidized, so there’s little financial incentive to change," Schnoor says. "But by continuing to burn coal, we’re not paying the true environmental cost, which includes the release of carbon dioxide and other particles, and sulfur dioxide emissions, which may be linked to the rise of emphysema and asthma in this country." Schnoor proposes "green accounting," which incorporates these externalities into the cost of production. Then alternate forms of energy production, like switch grass, wind, and solar energy, become more competitive.

"These kind of changes can happen through education and a gradual awareness of the issues," Schnoor says.

The center was established in 1990 and is uncommon in several ways. There are only two full-time staff members, administrative assistant Jane Frank, and Jeremie Moen, the departmental information specialist.

All CGRER faculty members hold appointments in their academic departments, which range from anthropology and economics to law and occupational and environmental health.

"Combining forces helps us to compete for large projects and grants, yet we’ve also built good will because we’re not ‘stealing’ faculty time or indirect costs—those stay with the participating faculty members’ departments," Schnoor says.

The center is able to operate this way because of a partnership with state utilities. All utility customers pay a tax of .015 percent on the dollar, of which 85 percent goes to fund research at the Iowa Energy Center at Iowa State University, and 15 percent to CGRER.

"Those funds keep our doors open," Schnoor says.

The center is also unusual in that it competes for grant money with programs at land grant institutions—The University of Iowa has no departments of agronomy, meteorology, or atmospheric science. So the center works closely with several faculty members at Iowa State. In the past year, collaborators at the center have garnered $6.1 million in grant money for use in studying global environmental change.

Although much environmental data is grim, Schnoor sees this kind of progress as reason for hope. And he acknowledges other positive changes since the first Earth Day nearly 31 years ago, on April 22, 1970.

"Our nation’s waterways have improved, thanks to an increased investment in water treatment plants," Schnoor says. "And globally, there’s a new social agenda—that’s included United Nations-sponsored meetings on human settlements, on poverty, on children in 1989, and on women in 1992," Schnoor says. "Global poverty is the world’s number one environmental problem—1.36 billion people have unsafe drinking water, 2 billion live with no sewage facilities, 7 million children die each year of diarrhea—and until these kinds of issues are addressed, it’s not possible to address an environmental agenda."

In coming to terms with these problems, Schnoor says, there is now a greater willingness among countries to come to a consensus and to mobilize en masse to form a more civil society.

"There’s a realization that there is no such thing as upwind anymore," Schnoor says with a smile. "Everyone is downwind from everyone else. We’re one big blue marble."

Article by Linzee Kull McCray